Archive for October, 2008

Google held its first ever party in Sweden last Thursday when YouTube introduced its Swedish version. This wasn’t an average release party, it was really ambitious and huge! The crowd was a great mix between media buyers, internet people and celebreties. Drinks and the post-party sausages was floating around free.

Good work by the Google people to get this party going, but too bad they didn’t mention anything on the advertising opportunities on the worlds by far largest video site. I did have a quick chat with CEO Stina Honkamaa on the topic though and she was pretty excited about this. She mentioned full page take overs, branded channels and formats she currently couldn’t talk about. We decided on a lunch later in November, maybe things will have gone less secret until then.

I believe that the advertising opportunities on YouTube will be critical for the rest of the online video advertising industry. With around 70% of the worlds video traffic, YouTube will have a big say on formats and pricing/packaging.

And finally here is Dante enjoying a Heiniken and below Swing Fly, one of my favorite artists live, on the stage.

This week is an important week for two great friends, and the future of music. Spotify and SoundCloud are both launching this week, it’s crazy!

Spotify

Spotify, founded by a good friend of mine, Daniel Ek, was finally launched after signing all of the major labels for its streaming music service.

I like to describe it as an “iTunes store” where you can stream all the music instantly, instead of buying/downloading it. The service has changed the way me and a lot of my friends are listening to music. It’s now also confirmed that our VC’s, Creandum, has made an investment in Spotify.

SoundCloud

Tomorrow I’m heading over to Berlin for the release party of the hyped music moving company SoundCloud. The company is founded by Eric Wahlforss and one of my best friends Alexander Ljung.

They moved to Berlin a year ago to build their company and tomorrow they are releasing one of the best designed and smartest services in the music industry. SoundCloud helps professional music artists distribute and share music, both in the pre and post release phases. If you are around in Berlin tomorrow Friday, make sure to join the party!

I don’t know how it happened, but in less than three months we’ve more than doubled our team. Being only the three founders in June, our team now sums up to seven people! The latest recruits are two multi talented guys ready to help us change the world.

These guys are fresh media tech engineers out of Stockholm’s top tech university KTH. Together they just completed their thesis project, kTube. They’ve built a complete video service for KTH to be used in the education, including CMS, video player, etc.

Joakim Sarnelid we actually recruited way back in June, but he couldn’t start until now. Joakim is a really skilled Java developer that will help us further improve the speed and reliability of our development with his skills in automated testing.

Of course, as all people in a startup needs to be, he’s multi talented and does a lot more than Java. After evaluating his coding skills we decided to bring him in and feel him out. And we certainly weren’t disappointed. Joakim is one of those individuals that everyone just likes. Kind, caring, perceptive, yet really funny.

Why does this sound like an episode of Nilecity? (Link in Swedish)

Apart from his coding skills Joakim juggles fire sticks, hikes or bikes mountains and joins 90 kilometer ski races (Vasaloppet). He’s also well traveled and surely knows why to avoid happy pizzas.

With only about a week left until Joakim was supposed to start, we learned that his friend and thesis colleague Jonas Frid was also scouting for openings.

Since we had already evaluated (and been impressed by) the source code output of the two we felt that we should really meet Jonas as well.

And sure, Jonas made us laugh too, so he was welcome to join. (With both of them, we just had to persuade them to turn down all the other attractive offerings they were getting.)

As with Joakim, Jonas is skilled with Java, but besides that he’s into usability and interface design. Lately he has based a lot of personal decisions on the dice but when it comes to coding he takes no chances. At least that’s what he tells us.

As multi talent is one of the key factors of becoming an employee here we weren’t disappointed when Jonas (during his first interview) mentioned as a side note that he’s authored a book in his spare time. His skills with German, French, Spanish and Chinese certainly wasn’t a setback either.

Oh yeah, and it sure is a pity that you couldn’t be there when Jonas (after having lost the dice) approached a somewhat reluctant young girl with his sweet talk. Impressing. Or not.

Last week was really exciting for us! We rebranded the company, attended our first trade show, partied until 5am, and met tech entreprenuers at Minibar.

Rouzbeh has put together some photos for you here, enjoy!

Ad:tech and adnetworks

The show was really good for us. Besides learning a lot and getting a better feeling of where the market is heading, we got to show off Monetizer 1.0 and got great feedback!

Something that really got me thinking was all the ad networks (there were more than 50 of them there!). There are loads of them out there and quite a few are actually monetizing video. A couple of them are doing prerolls, but that’s about it.

I believe the networks have one big problem when it comes to video: consistency. Different sites have different video players, sizes, length of content, interfaces and functionality making implementation and traffic a nightmare.

For Videoplaza this is both an opportunity and challenge. I will put a lot of the coming weeks brain time to better understand our place in this ecosystem. We can’t afford to bet on the wrong things here.